Prize-winning story of innocence shattered offers terror and solace
The International Booker Prize was awarded recently to a best-selling, already notorious portrait of childhood, “The Discomfort of Evening,” written by Dutch novelist Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translated by Michele Hutchison. At 29, Rijneveld (who uses they/them pronouns) is the youngest-ever recipient of the prize. “I am proud as a cow with seven udders,” they responded to the official announcement.
This is Rijneveld in short: an earthy and irreverent new voice, thrillingly uninhibited in style and subject matter. “The Discomfort of Evening” is set among dairy farmers who are members of a strict Protestant sect, much like the writer’s own family. Rijneveld still works on a farm. The novel teems — I say this admiringly — with all the filth of life.
The title refers to the point in the evening when cows begin to low and call for relief, their udders heavy with milk. The story is about painful repletion of another kind, and of solace that never arrives.
The Mulder family has come apart after the death of the oldest child, a son, in an ice-skating accident. Jas, the 10-year-old narrator, refuses to take off her red coat; it hangs on her, increasingly foul-smelling and heavy, pockets drooping with toads, rabbit whiskers and other mementos for the protective rituals she and her two remaining siblings have taken to performing. Her brother torments animals as sacrifices. Her sister dreams of fleeing the farm. Their parents scarcely look at each other, scarcely touch. Jas — who has grown up in a home with a lavish vocabulary for animals, but obsessional silence where human life is concerned — assesses her parents pragmatically: “This must mean they don’t mate either.”
Enter those toads. Jas believes that her resentment of her brother caused his death. Now she is convinced that if she can force her bucket of toads to mate, her parents might follow suit. Health and happiness would be restored. It is one of her milder schemes. There’s also the involved subplot that deals with Jas’ persistent constipation; she makes herself ill to give her parents a topic of conversation.
The story draws partly from life. Rijneveld also grew up with the notion of a “threatening, cruel God” in a family annihilated by the death of a son in childhood. Rijneveld says their parents are still “too frightened” to read the novel.
This strikes me as eminently sensible. I was wary myself. I’d heard about scenes of animal torture, and of sadistic sexual exploration between the siblings. In an interview, Hutchison spoke of the difficulty of translating some parts, particularly those involving incest: “I’d tend not to do those passages at the end of the day, in case I would get nightmares.”
The novel didn’t give me nightmares only because sleep became a faint possibility. Rijneveld will play to all your phobias and nurture new ones. Even now, my blood jumps to remember certain images. The pull-tab from a can of Coke. That scene in which Jas and her brother entice a neighborhood girl into the farm’s “sperm barn,” where seed is harvested from the bulls. It’s a matter of a few short paragraphs, but how Patrick Bateman would twist with envy.
There is the matter of the toads. I would like to extend a personal apology to all toads.
It’s not the violence that feels so shocking — it’s the innocence. The violence in the book is visited on small bodies, mute bodies, by those who are themselves small, young, lacking in language. Jas’ narration might be rich with metaphors — but almost all of them are bovine. She finds corollaries only in the world of the cows; she cannot tether herself to anything human. As the Mulder parents retreat into grief, their children are left alone to invent their own rules, their own cosmology. They cross ordinary borders of decency in wild confusion. The blurring of victim and perpetrator is complex, complete, difficult to bear.
However strong your readerly constitution, it might feel like a peculiar time to pick up a book so mournful and gory. And yet, I went to it every day without dread, with, in fact, a gratitude that surprised me. It was the gratitude of not being condescended to. Novels disappoint not only by being clumsily written or conceived but by presenting a version of the world that is simpler and more sanitized than we know it to be. Fiction about childhood is especially prone, with a few notable exceptions (the work of Jean Stafford, for example). The spaciousness of Rijneveld’s imagination comes as terror and solace. That lack of squeamishness, that frightening extremity, which, in Hutchison’s clean, calm translation, never feels showy or manipulative, gives full voice to the enormity of the children’s grief, their obscene deprivation.
As with any novel so interested in complicity and repression, there’s a temptation to read “The Discomfort of Evening” as a parable. I was frequently reminded of Michael Haneke’s film “The White Ribbon,” about the savage, secretive rituals of a group of children in a German village before World War I.
It’s another excoriation of a punitive Protestantism and familial cycles of violence, which Haneke holds responsible for creating a society vulnerable to fascist ideology. The cowed children of the film enact their humiliations on one another. They will grow up, we understand, to become Nazis. “The Discomfort of Evening” is not nearly so explicit. Jas is studying the Holocaust at school. Her questions and preoccupations gesture at the links between the individual and the collective’s capacity for denial and willed amnesia.
But these are intimations only, embers. We return always to Jas, in her smelly, decidedly non-allegorical coat, filled with toads. We return to her story that feels like a dare — can we face it when even her parents have turned away? Will we succumb to discomfort or will we find in that discomfort a harsh and surprising lesson — the writer’s credo? “Discomfort is pure because it’s when we’re vulnerable,” Rijneveld has said. “It’s when we’re being ourselves instead of pretending to be who we want to be.”